Designing Technology for an Aging Population

Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn). Kate Finn has worked on user interfaces and usability since 1983. After obtaining her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University, she conducted research on natural language understanding systems and automated speech recognition. She was at SRI International for 6 years, where she designed and developed prototypes of graphical user interfaces for sophisticated intelligence systems. Since SRI, she has worked as an independent usability consultant, primarily on websites. She organized several workshops on Video-Mediated Communication, and was the lead editor on the book Video-Mediated Communication. She obtained a Certificate in Gerontology to better understand the unique capabilities and needs of older users. Currently Kate is co-founder and CEO of Wiser Usability, Inc. (wiserusability.com). She also blogs about design, aging, and technology at kate-finn.com.